Text Size

-

+

reset

Those calls will be part of new legislation to be released Wednesday reauthorizing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for two more years, and though the bill doesn’t use the term “moon base,” the goal is clear.

“The [NASA] Administrator shall establish a program to develop a sustained human presence on the Moon and the surface of Mars,” states a recent discussion draft obtained by POLITICO.

New language in the bill also says that while the NASA chief is authorized to develop international partnerships to establish a “sustained presence” on the two celestial bodies, “the absence of an international partner may not be justification for failure to pursue such program in a timely manner.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich famously said during last year’s presidential campaign that the U.S. would have a permanent base on the moon by the end of his second term, drawing mockery from Mitt Romney, who said he’d fire someone for proposing to spend billions on such a project.

But the new NASA authorization isn’t quite as ambitious as Gingrich’s plan.

Although it calls for bases on the moon and Mars, the bill doesn’t set a specific timetable for any of this and opts for a “go-as-we-can-afford-to-pay” strategy.

The language in the new bill is a “reaffirmation” of earlier authorizations and existing law, a Republican committee aide said—although it does add the Mars plan. The Science panel’s space subcommittee will hold a hearing Wednesday morning to discuss the bill, which will be released around the same time.

With the end of NASA’s space shuttle program in 2011 and the International Space Station’s retirement at the end of the decade, the aide said, the question is, “what comes next?”

“While the Chinese are dumping money into their space program, American astronauts are hitching rides to the International Space Station on Russian rockets,” Space subcommittee Chairman Steven Palazzo (R-Miss.) said in a statement.

“NASA no longer even has the capability of sending our astronauts into space. We must ensure every single dollar appropriated to NASA is spent effectively and efficiently—that is why we are prohibiting further work on costly distractions like the Obama Administration’s Asteroid Retrieval Mission,” he added.

Closer to home, the new authorization rolls back NASA’s spending on climate change research to 2008 levels in an effort to restore “proper balance to NASA’s science portfolio,” a bill summary states. The push is justified, the committee says, because several different government agencies spend money on climate science research, but only NASA focuses on space exploration.

Democrats on the committee preferred not to comment on the bill but said the GOP draft was presented to them late last week, a committee aide said.

So, how much would a moon colony cost?

George Washington University’s John Logsdon, founder of the school’s Space Policy Institute, was cited by CNN last year saying the project could cost somewhere between $250 billion to $500 billion.